Site Mobile Navigation

Push to Add Charter Schools Hangs Over Strike

Blair Burson, a second-grade teacher at Chicago International Charter School Bucktown, helped a student on Wednesday.Credit
Nathan Weber for The New York Times

CHICAGO — Of the issues that remain to be settled in the contract dispute here between the teachers’ union and the city, expanding charter schools is not officially on the table.

But the specter of those plans — an oft-cited goal of Mayor Rahm Emanuel — hangs heavily over the teachers’ strike. “Even if it’s not explicitly something that we’re bargaining over,” said Jackson Potter, staff coordinator for the Chicago Teachers Union, “everyone knows it’s the elephant in the room.”

While 350,000 students here remained out of school for the third day of the citywide teachers’ strike, about 50,000 who attend the city’s 96 charter schools went to class as usual. The charters, which are publicly financed but privately operated, are not required to hire unionized workers, and a majority of them do not. Experienced teachers at charter schools make about $15,000 to $30,000 less than their counterparts at traditional district schools, where the average salary is $75,000.

Union members see the mayor’s vocal support for charters as of a piece with other initiatives that he has introduced, and that have led to the strike. Charters play a prominent role in a national education agenda for change that includes more rigorous teacher evaluations and challenges to union seniority, issues that have proved nettlesome in these negotiations.

But here as in other cities across the nation, the role of charters ignites passions on both sides. Teachers regard them as a way for districts to undermine union protections, and say that underperforming schools are often closed before they have a chance to improve, and then are replaced with charters.

“This is an effort to pull out the rug from under neighborhood schools and the union members who work in them,” Mr. Potter said.

Critics also argue that charter schools, which have open enrollment policies but often draw pupils from across a city, siphon away public financing and the most motivated students from neighborhood schools, leaving teachers in traditional public schools to work with the most needy students.

Sharonya Simon was looking for a better fit for her son when she pulled him out of a gifted program in a traditional district school five years ago and enrolled him — and later her daughter — in Chicago International Charter School Bucktown, on the Northwest Side. At the neighborhood school, “I did not feel like he was being challenged,” she said during a parents’ meeting at the school on Wednesday.

Ms. Simon also said that teachers spent too much time disciplining troubled students, and that many of her son’s classmates came from families with uninterested parents.

At the charter school, she said, “you have a different group because of what we have to go through to get our kids into a charter school. You have more involved parents here.” Ms. Simon said she was also happy with the quality of instruction there.

Unlike district schools that work under more centralized leadership, charter schools govern their own curriculum and finances. Although Mayor Emanuel frequently holds up specific charter schools as exemplary performers, and has cited the fact that 19,000 families are on waiting lists for the city’s charter schools, their performance has been mixed, here as in the rest of the country.

As originally conceived, charters were designed to be laboratories for new ideas in education that could then be transferred to traditional public schools.

Photo

Despite the teachers’ strike, classes were in session on Wednesday at Bucktown and the other charter schools in Chicago.Credit
Nathan Weber for The New York Times

In fact, some of the issues that have been most contentious in the Chicago contract negotiations — test-score-driven teacher evaluations, more freedom for principals to make hiring decisions separate from seniority rules, and longer school days — originated in charter schools.

“We want charters to be not only helpful to the kids in them, but we want them to be helpful for the broader set of kids in public education,” said Todd Ziebarth, vice president for state advocacy at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

But charters often have more freedom to develop curriculum and other policies than traditional schools do.

On Wednesday morning, second graders at Bucktown sat on the carpet in front of their teacher, Blair Burson, as she guided them through a lesson in distinguishing realism from fantasy in “Julius,” a book about a girl and her pet pig that the class had read that morning.

Christy Krier, the director of the Bucktown school, said that students took numerous tests throughout the year to gauge their learning and to help teachers adjust their lesson plans.

Although students’ progress on these tests figure into teacher evaluations, Ms. Krier said that she did not set classwide targets for teachers to meet in order to qualify for a particular rating. “Teachers are so focused on students that it is really not brought up,” she said.

The public school teachers’ union has balked at the city’s plan to base 25 percent of a teacher’s rating on student achievement, going to 40 percent in five years. Those rules will not apply to the city’s charter schools.

The mayor has not set specific goals for the number of charter schools he is planning, but has openly praised the 12 high schools in the Noble Network of Charter Schools.

Michael Milkie, co-founder and chief executive of the Noble Network, said he hoped it could grow to 20 schools in five years, and serve up to 15,000 students.

“I think charter schools are the best answer for improving urban districts,” Mr. Milkie said. The struggles of traditional public schools, he said, is “not anybody’s fault per se, but in a district with lots of bureaucracy both from the district side and union contract side, it’s very difficult to make the kind of progress that’s needed.”

Education advocates say there is a danger if a district mounts a strategy to replace many neighborhood schools. Warren Simmons, executive director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, said closing failing schools “places the entire responsibility for the schools’ failure on the shoulders of the school” when broader problems with the district’s policies could be responsible.

As charters go from being isolated incubators to “the way the administration is doing business,” he said, charters could run into the same problems district schools face.

For now, Cornelia Twilley, who has daughters in fifth and eighth grade at Bucktown, said she prefers charter schools. She withdrew her daughters from neighborhood schools because she felt they were unsafe and were not providing a rigorous education.

“It is about choices as a parent,” she said. “Why would you stay in a place where you know your kids are not going to get the very best they deserve?”

A version of this article appears in print on September 13, 2012, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Push to Add Charter Schools Hangs Over Strike. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe